Display your mesh as an interactive structure.
Move the vertices of the structure to fit your real world object.
Save the new vertex structure,load it up and combine with the original .dae's UV coordinates.

Now all you need to do is make some compelling content to display on your model ;D

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One note: the composition actually appears to be using the deprecated _1024_InteractionStructure plugin, instead of _1024_Structure_Interaction from the new _1024 Structure Tools plugin (which you mention as requirement).

Yep sorry about that.
I also found it to be more reliable with Kineme File Tools 1.2 to write the structure.

I also encountered an issue I was not expecting....
Because you need to put the mesh within a GL Ortho environment in order to have interactive access to all the vertices the lighting environment will not operate as expected with shadows switched on.

I don't know if this is a bug with the Ortho patch? Maybe it is actually an expected behaviour as it is squashing the verts onto one z plane.
Any ideas or suggestions?

I've done something similar using a shader to do the warping instead of moving verts - it means the lighting works fine but its not as flexible with the vert positioning (you're restricted to stretching things based on a bounding box) - I'd love to be able to post it but it was for work so unfortunately I can't release it :(

yep GLSL - instead of working at the vertex level I just drew a bounding box around the source model and another around the target position, fed these into the shader and used a free form deformation to "stretch" everything accordingly. As all of the vertices, texture coordinates etc get changed relative to each other you don't end up with any glitchiness, or I didn't anyway.

I got this working a bit better by loading the new structure outside of the Ortho, the lighting/shadows work now.
Obvious problem being that if you interact with the ortho version and then display in perspective it won't fit so you have to toggle between views. Set a reference vertex (in the case of overlaying verts) in perspective view and switch to ortho in order to grab individual vertices easily.

I like the sound of your shader method jrs, sounds a bit like the GL Matrix Multi environment, but with draggable corners. I wonder if I can do something similar with _1024 structure tools bounding box...?